Inventor Dean Kamen Says Healthcare Debate "Backward Looking"

• Dean Kamen
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Popular Mechanics editor-in-chief James Meigs and deputy editor Jerry Beilinson recently interviewed inventor Dean Kamen for a future issue of PM. Kamen, head of the Manchester, New Hampshire, firm Deka Research, is one of today's most celebrated inventors, holding over 440 patents, primarily in the medical field. His innovations include the first wearable infusion pump, a portable kidney dialysis machine, a more flexible stent, one of the world's most advanced prosthetic arms, and many other devices used in the treatment of diabetes, heart disease, cancer and other conditions.

In the course of a wide-ranging interview, Kamen offered a strongly contrarian take on the current healthcare debate. We felt his comments add an important perspective to the dialogue, and decided to post this portion of the interview in advance of the issue.

Popular Mechanics: The federal government is considering major healthcare legislation that may have implications for medical R&D as well as the treatment of patients. What do you think of the current proposals for reform, inside and out of Congress?

Dean Kamen: I'm very worried that the entire debate over healthcare is a misguided attempt to deal with a subject nobody really wants to deal with openly.

PM: In what way?

Kamen: Well, I mean the whole supposition that "We have a crisis in healthcare." Our healthcare system has seen some of the greatest achievements of the human intellect since we started recording history: We're developing incredible devices and implantables to improve the quantity and quality of people's lives. We're developing pharmaceuticals that alleviate the need for surgery and eliminate the volatile effects of diseases. We're making the surgeries that are necessary ever less invasive. You can get a stent through your femoral artery all the way up into your heart and fix a blockage without surgery. I'd say, if we have a crisis, it's the embarrassment of riches. Nobody wants to deal with the fact that we're no longer in a world where you can simply give everybody all the healthcare that is available.

Each side of this debate has created the boogieman and monsters, like "We don't want let this program to come into existence because that will mean rationing." Well, I hate to tell you the news but as soon as medicine started being able to do incredible things that are very expensive, we started rationing. The reason 100 years ago everyone could afford their healthcare is because healthcare was a doctor giving you some elixir and telling you you'll be fine. And if it was a cold you would be fine. And if it turns out it was consumption; it was tuberculosis; it was lung cancer—you could still sit there. He'd give you some sympathy, and you'd die. Either way, it's pretty cheap.

We now live in a world where technology has triumphed, in many ways, over death. The problem with that is that it's enormously expensive. And big pharmaceutical giants and big medical products companies have stopped working on stuff that could be extraordinary because they know they won't be reimbursed, according to the common standards. We're not only rationing today; we're rationing our future.

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